CNN confirmed Monday that it had been deceived about the identity of a man featured in a viral news report last week appearing to show the moment he was found in a Syrian prison and freed.

The man told CNN he was Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed he had been locked up for three months, but a Syrian fact-checking group later cast doubt on those assertions and said it had identified him as Salama Mohammad Salama, an officer of the notorious Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

CNN told HuffPost earlier on Monday it was investigating if the man gave a “false identity.”

“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Clarissa Ward, who led the initial report, posted on social media Monday evening.

CNN published an article elaborating on its findings.

“A man who was filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus jail was a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed,” the opening of the article read.

Salam was found in a jail run by the Syrian Air Force’s intelligence services until Bashar Assad’s regime collapsed on Dec. 8, according to CNN. The network said its team was there to pursue leads on the missing American journalist, Austin Tice.

CNN said a resident of the Bayada neighborhood in Homs provided a photo of Salama apparently on duty in military garb, which CNN found, via facial recognition technology, to be a 99% match with the man in its report.

Locals also told CNN Salama had a reputation for extortion and harassment.

The network said it had been unable to reestablish contact with him.

It noted that Verify-Sy, the Syrian fact-checking organization, had been the first to identify Salama over the weekend. CNN’s findings aligned with what the group reported, though they were more limited.

The group also reported that Salama had been involved in numerous acts of violence and that he had been jailed for less than a month after a “dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”

After the initial report aired, Ward posted, “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”

According to CNN’s translation, the man told them he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and beaten. He suggested he did not know Assad’s regime had fallen until his shock discovery in the cell. Ward’s team provided him with food and water before he was taken away by workers with a medical relief group.

CNN was accompanied by a guard from the rebel forces, who the network said was the one to approve the man’s release.

CNN says it is investigating the background and identity of a man featured in a stunning recent report appearing to show his discovery in and release from a Syrian prison.

The report, which aired last week, showed CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her team coming across a man in a cell and assisting him out of the facility following the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime.

Ward reported that he identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs, and that he said he had been imprisoned for three months. He said he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and asked about “names of terrorists,” per CNN’s translation in the initial report.

Over the weekend, a Syrian fact-checking organization, Verify-Sy, cast doubt on CNN’s reporting, alleging that the man’s name is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.

According to Verify-Sy, he was an officer of the brutal Syrian Air Force Intelligence. The fact-checking group accused Salama of involvement in “theft, extortion, and coercing residents [of Homs] into becoming informants.”

Citing interviews with Homs locals, Verify-Sy reported that the man had been incarcerated for less than a month due to a “dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”

The site alleged that Salama had also been involved in the killings of civilians, and detention and torture of young men on spurious charges in 2014.

HuffPost has not independently verified these claims.

Verify-Sy also questioned the veracity of CNN’s report overall, suggesting the man’s appearance and reactions were incongruous with the conditions he claimed to have been held in.

In a statement, a CNN spokesperson told HuffPost, “No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison building featured in our report that day.”

“The events transpired as they appear in our film. The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard – a Syrian rebel,” it continued. “We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution.”

The spokesperson said CNN is now investigating the man’s background “and are aware that he may have given a false identity.”

“We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story,” the statement said.

After a rebel offensive overthrew the Assad regime on Dec. 8, rebel forces began releasing the government’s political prisoners en masse.

CNN initially reported that the prisoner had not been aware Assad’s government had fallen, and that he learned of it when Ward’s team, accompanied by a guard from the rebel forces, discovered him locked in a Damascus prison cell.

Last week, Ward reported they were at the Damascus facility, a prison building at the Syrian air force intelligence headquarters, to do a story about the thousands of Syrians who disappeared into Assad’s prisons, in particular Austin Tice, an American journalist who is still missing after he was detained in Syria more than a decade ago.

Journalist Clarissa Ward was part of a CNN team that reported it had discovered and helped to free a man still locked up in a Syrian prison, apparently unaware that Bashar Assad’s regime had fallen.

CNN’s cameras captured the moment Ward came across the man, cloaked in a blanket in a locked cell of an otherwise already-emptied prison, and assisted him out into the open air.

“We were looking to do a story about the tens of thousands of Syrians who have vanished into Assad’s dungeons, and particularly also about one American journalist, Austin Tice, who was disappeared,” Ward later reported on CNN.

“But when we started to look inside one facility, we found something that we never could have imagined,” she said.

After a guard shoots the lock off the door, Ward is shown entering the cell, where a dark blanketed form is seen in the corner.

“Is there someone there?” Ward asks multiple times. When a guard approaches, a man emerges from beneath the cover, with his hands raised.

According to a CNN translation, the man said he had been in the cell for three months.

“You’re OK, you’re OK,” Ward tells him. She offers him water while he clutches her hand, taking large gulps.

As they walk him out into the daylight, he stares up at the sky in relief.

According to Ward, the captors fled during the fall of Damascus, leaving the man with no food or water for at least four days. He said he had been taken from his home, interrogated about his phone and beaten.

The man, apparently in shock, is assisted into a vehicle by paramedics after speaking with the team about his ordeal.

“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed,” Ward said of the incident on social media.

A rebel offensive overthrew Assad’s regime on Sunday, ending the Assad family’s 50-year rule. The rebel forces have since begun emptying Syria’s political prisons.